[CAnet - news] Optiputer 10Gbps lightpath to NASA high performance collaboratory

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[An excellent example of the combination of high speed lightpaths and data
intensive applications. Some excerpts from  press release  -- BSA]


http://www.calit2.net/articles/article.php?id=660		


 NEWS RELEASE

Live Demonstration of 21st Century National-Scale Team Science

UCSD and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Linked Using OptIPuter
Technologies over a 10-Gbps National LambdaRail Dedicated Optical Path

8.12.05 -- There are four wings to the Earth Science building of the Goddard
Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD. But on August 8, "we added a
virtual fifth wing," says NASA Emeritus Scientist Milton Halem. That new
wing used experimental OptIPuter software to create a 'high-performance
collaboratory' with the University of California, San Diego's Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, which allowed
scientists to establish high-definition telepresence while also
collaborating in real time on visualizing massive amounts of remote land and
weather data. 

Working closely with researchers at the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UCSD and
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at
Chicago (UIC), GSFC networking and visualization staff conducted the first
successful system test of a new coast-to-coast, 10-Gigabit per second (Gbps)
Ethernet cyber backplane - or 'lambda' - linking the NASA research center to
UCSD some 3,000 miles away.

With this high performance optical pathway established, OptIPuter
technologies were shown to perform  complex scientific analysis and
visualization displays of voluminous data sets remotely located across the
continent as though the data resided on a local server. Other demonstrations
showed the interactive visualization or roaming over data images with
resolutions forming objects  1,000 times larger than is feasible  using the
World Wide Web over the shared Internet.  The OptIPuter computer research
project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by Calit2
and EVL, and Earth science research at Scripps is one of the two driving
applications for the OptIPuter project.

"Information technology is changing the way that teams of scientists
collaborate on large-scale problems that involve huge amounts of data," says
NASA's Halem. "We are prototyping a new information infrastructure to
provide NASA scientists along with their observational data holdings and
models interoperable links with scientists at other research institutions
engaged in collaborative investigations and studies.  These successful
demonstrations showed significant progress in achieving the Holy Grail of
collaborative computational Earth and space science for the early decades of
the 21st century."

The Aug. 8 demonstration gave Goddard officials a glimpse of a future when a
scientist at the research center will be able interactively to visualize
large remote data sets generated either by satellites or supercomputers
connected to the National LambdaRail (NLR). NLR is a nationwide fiber optic
network infrastructure designed to give academic scientists the predictable
and large bandwidth they need to do advanced research.

"This capability is going to become increasingly important as the explosion
in sensor networks or grids continues, real-time data streams grow in size,
and models assimilate these data to extend predictions into future hours and
days," notes Scripps' John Orcutt, the Director of UCSD's Center for Earth
Observations and Applications (CEOA). "Next month UCSD, Scripps, the
University of Washington and Woods Hole will use CAVEwave to bring real-time
HD TV from the seafloor to the iGrid meeting at Calit2 and HD back to the
ship above the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) on the seafloor. The NSF
Laboratory for Ocean Observatory Knowledge and Information Grid (LOOKING)
project is funding this effort. We're all getting tangible samples of the
collaborative science of the future."
"Establishing this optical 'clear channel' between two of the nation's
premier centers for earth system science has been a project Milt and I have
driven for the past two years,"  explains Calit2's Smarr. Adds Aaron Chin,
the OptIPuter project manager at UCSD: "With the new 10-Gbps link, we have
extended the Calit2 OptIPuter "living laboratory" for earth sciences on the
UCSD campus to our colleagues at Goddard."

The OptIPuter project played a critical role in ensuring that the San Diego
end of the network could support the extreme bandwidth required for
transmitting data to and from Scripps. Much of the integration of the tiled
display used at Scripps occurred at the UCSD-based National Center for
Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), an NIH/NCRR-supported biotechnology
resource. NCMIR and Scripps are the two drivers of applications for the
OptIPuter: Earth sciences, and biomedical imaging. NCMIR's David Lee was on
hand for the demo at SIO (see Collaborators box at right).



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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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